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Sunday, 23 March 2014

Meditating on pain; arguing with the boot

So, I have been meditating on pain.
Not out of choice (because that would be a bit perverse) but because one meditates on whatever comes up
really. I was lying there, in bed,
wondering quite how to get through the night, and I thought about how pain
is a message. Pain is simply the way our
body tells our mind that something is wrong.
So I acknowledged it, thanked it for letting me know all wasn’t quite right (okay, not remotely right),
and promised I’d sort it out in the morning. But it
didn’t go. So I furrowed my brow and
said, ‘Okay, body, what’s this pain about then?’ And my bodymind threw out an image of a sort
of dark cloud that coalesced into a boot which kicked me in the guts again and
again.

‘Ouch,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said my bodymind. ‘Ouch
indeed.’

‘So you’re not going away?’ I said.

‘In the dreams you won't be having, baby,’ it said, and ramped up the pain factor a bit,
just to show who was boss.

Well, screw you, pain, I thought.
But, of course, becoming tense and angry just made it ten times
worse. So that was when I figured I might
as well meditate it. I mean, pain is
just our mind, right? It’s just messages from the brain. So there must be an override switch,
right? And meditation works pretty well
for emotional and mental pain, so why not physical? After all, where does one end and the other
begin, huh? The boot laughed and said, 'Just our mind? Just messages? Just? Just? JUST?'

I tried breathing it away but that didn’t
work – the breaths were too long, they stretched too far. So I took the focus
smaller and smaller, into each moment. And
started wondering what exactly a moment is; how small it can be. My focus shrank smaller and smaller still. And smaller... Until, suddenly, there it was – no pain. Just a sensation. And this is nothing new but it
struck me that pain is a time construct – a combination of past memory and
future fear. Rather like music. More and more these days, as I listen to
music, I find myself thinking how funny it is that we can ‘like’ a song, a
piece of music, a symphony, a whatever.
When really all we ever hear in the ‘now’ is a single note or even just
a part of a note. It is purely our mind,
flicking back and forth over time past and future, that creates a hologram of
the whole piece of music. And, of
course, that goes for everything really – every poem, every book, every meal, every
drink, every joke, every dream, every kiss, every orgasm, every day, every
year, every life. Every thing. Strings of moments that we tug together to create
meaningful ‘wholes’, chunks of time that become events or things.

Again, nothing new. All very
Zen. But, actually, very damn
useful. Of course, it’s hard to keep it
going hour after hour. I would struggle with pain-free meditation for eight hours. But
it bought me time. It's buying me time. J

6 comments:

Jane, as always, it's interesting to read your post and to learn a bit from you.

I do hope that the pain will soon go away even without the aid of meditation.

After reading your earlier post I have been trying to practice the breathing meditation every day and have found it helpful.

In the past few weeks, I've spent a few unwanted hours in my dentist's chair as she works on creating a crown to repair a broken tooth. Of course, she does the numbing bit, to help me through the potential physical pain of the process, but what I've also been doing to try to not tense up, is...concentrating on the sound of the drilling rather than anticipating any potential feeling of pain. I've been trading one sense for the other.

Seems helpful. One more appointment to go. It's gonna be on April Fool's Day. Coronation Day for me.

I quite often tell myself that pain is just the memory (dentist, shots etc.) It's not at the time but it's often over in a flash, but you can actually tell yourself you'll be OK even if you don't manage to make the pain go away. Very interesting concept, but I would think it's also important not to think every pain away just in case there's something requiring immediate medical attention.